Light

“The light that shines in your mind takes its luminescence from the same source that makes all this shine. It is one light, really, one light underneath the mountain, underneath the leaf, shining as the sun, born inside your mind. There is only one light, and though luminosity itself may vary, that singular shining does not. There is one ray that divides itself so that all the people, every stone, every thought—they can all shine just as brilliantly as every other person, every stone, every thought. One ray is all that we are, one light seemingly encased in so many different things but really not bound at all by anything real, anything material, anything essential. The one shining gives this place its form. It gives you your body—light become matter. It gives essence to your words—light become expression. It gives meaning in the sense that because it is all the same light it is all holy. There is one real thing, we are just emitting that; every action, every thought, every movement, every practice just a ray of that ray, a defraction in time and space of that one light. We are the children of this in the sense that it literally bore us, and we are the source of this in the sense that it begins again inside us, every single moment. We are light, not in the sense that darkness cannot be or is somehow wrong or forbidden, but in the sense that even the darkness is part of this same shining. And whatever we think is unholy and ‘other’, whatever we believe too black, too obscure, these are all just another way the light bends and shines and is. You cannot be anything else. You cannot not shine. The love that brought you here, that love that light has for its own shining, is your very essence, your very being, and all other expressions of that, all hatred, all anger, all violence, all mistrust and disdain and despair, all are subsumed into that one love, that one light, all pieces of that, shining as surely and as brightly as all the rest of creation. We are not just made for this shining, we are made of it. We are complete, we are whole, we are harmless, and we are already home because of this shining. We are one as this and we are one with it, and it is the same in each thing, in each body, in each mind, in every action, every choice, every manifestation of will. We are shining, and that is endless, that is perfect, that is being. Begin this new year knowing your place in all things, knowing your belonging and your wholeness, knowing that despair is a ray of light too, that hatred sings the same way all form does. Know that your shining is perfect and that it is yours, and that in it and because of it, you are already whole, already healed, already home.”